[Abolition]. Religious Society of Friends (London).

Case of the Vigilante, a Ship Employed in the Slave-Trade; with Some Reflections on that Traffic. London: Harvey, Darton & Co., 1823. [Bound with:] Wilberforce, William. Lettre à l’Empereur Alexandre sur la Traite des Noirs.

Londres: Imprimé par G. Schulze, 1822. First edition of each title. 2 vols in 1, 8vo (8.13 x 5.25 inches), contemporary acid-stained boards, orange spine label, decorations at the head and foot of the spine, 13, [3]; [2], 83, [1] pages. Foldout frontispiece to the Vigilante approx. 22 x 18 inches. A few neat old repairs to the verso of the plate and a few short closed tears; fragile boards a bit chipped at the head and foot of the spine; some occasional spotting in the text; still, a very good and fresh copy. Item #22530

18 May 2026: On hold for an institution while they check their records. Please check back, and please inquire if of interest!

“Not stars but slaves are mapped into the terrible grid of this slave ship, a portrait of individual suffering multiplied by 347 people and then millions” (Tufte 22).

“Reader! look at the Plate, and dwell for a few moments on those emotions which thou must feel.”

Two complementary works intended to further the abolition of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans, this copy (given the binding style) most likely with a continental European provenance—suggestive of the combined efforts of British Quakers, the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, abolitionist politicians like Wilberforce, and above all this graphic depiction of the horrors of the slave trade, intended to enlist broader European support to enforce the prohibitions against the trade that emerged after the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

“On Wednesday morning we were surprised with the novel circumstance of the arrival of a French brig, of 240 tons, called the Vigilante, as a prize. She [was] captured, with several others, in the act of slave trading (having 343 on board), on 15th of April last, in the river Bonny (northward of the line), by the boats of his Majesty’s ships Iphigenia and Myrmidon, manned with about 150 seamen, and commanded by Lieutenant G. Wm. St John Mildmay, after a most severe contest, in which two seamen were killed and seven were wounded. It is not known how many of the slaves suffered in this vessel as they jumped overboard, and were destroyed by the sharks; and the crew mixing with the slaves in the hold, after our seamen were in the possession of the upper deck, several slaves were also killed . . . The state of the unhappy slaves on board these vessels it is impossible to describe” (emphasis added, Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1822).

The Vigilante out of Nantes was captured by Lieutenant William St. John Mildmay of the Royal Navy in the river Bonny on the coast of West Africa in April, 1822, and the graphic accounts here of the battle to take the Vigilante and the conditions of the 347 enslaved on board the ship were no doubt intended to provoke further popular and political sentiment for abolition; the remarkable folding diagrams here of the enslaved in the hold of the Vigilante attempt to do what the Guardian suggests can’t be done given the scope of the horror of the ship, and were drawn from direct examination of the captured ship in Portsmouth by S. Croad. Engraved by John Hawkesworth, and reminiscent of the earlier Clarkson plates of the Brookes (which presumably were not current in this generation), these diagrams are hailed by data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte as revealing “the ghastly workings of a slave ship perhaps better that purely representational still-life drawings or photographs” (Beautiful Evidence 22).

References: Vigilante: Edward R. Tufte. Beautiful Evidence (Cheshire, Ct., 2006). Lib. Company. Afro-Americana 2109; Sabin 81922. Wilberforce: Sabin 103955.

Price: $8,500.00